Web view apps can still work offline if they're designed for it.

Yes, but the 3mb is just the wrapper, I bet if you delete the hundred-ish megabytes of cache, it won't work offline anymore :)

But that's entirely fair: of course caching data uses up storage. But it's my choice - I can pay for what I use. The crucial part is that I don't need to download an app which is hundreds of megabytes large just in order to hypothetically support caching.

No one can tell me that our species can write 1K ZX Chess (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1K_ZX_Chess) – an entire chess game with intelligent opponents which only takes up 672 bytes – and yet we can't write an email client which isn't a million times that size.

I agree if cached data was actually proportional to usage.

But a lot of these webview kind of apps just download the whole thing anyways, so it's literally just a matter of if the bytes are classified under "application size" or "cache" by the OS.

(Precisely so they have the whole thing available for when you need to use it offline)

It's often the high-res assets (images, videos, sounds, animations etc.) which take up most of the space, not the code itself.

When it comes to the code, the reason that they are bigger is how apps are distributed and have isolated runtimes. There are several commonly used sdks and libraries but because of how mobile app distribution works, these common libraries have to be bundled with each app and are not installed as a reusable library (like you can do with Linux, for example).

> and yet we can't write an email client which isn't a million times that size.

The issue is that the Gmail app isn’t just an email client, it does way more than that. That doesn’t excuse the abusive behavior, but it does explain it.

That game was famous for how bad it was, except that it miraculously fit in a tiny package.

Yeah I realized that too late :)